Everyone loves pulling up a website that renders with a bright green background, purple text in Comic Sans, a dancing waving logo, and a couple of pixelated images that load line by line.
Psych! No one likes that, and it comes down to the basic reason that we prefer well-performing websites and social media posts.
The question becomes, how do you optimize your channels so that the majority of people who stumble across them – or intentionally come to find them – react with approval and pleasure? There are, of course, a million answers to this question (and we sure do like to tackle them here at soona), but at the very top of the list are great images.
Why do images matter so much?
“When deciding whether to make a potential purchase, 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos,” says LinkedIn. They add, “across social channels, photo and imagery posts are the most-used content type to increase audience engagement.”
Not only do your photos bring people in initially, their quality and genuineness have long-term implications for your brand. According to the same LinkedIn source, 22% of returns happen because the product doesn’t look the same in person as it did online.
So let’s get it right … right?
Right. In this article, we will talk about resizing images for websites and social media. We will also cover the requirements for different platforms and other factors to consider for image optimization. Lastly, we will explore methods for managing a large collection of product images.
Benefits of Correct Image Sizing
An image is an image, is it not?
Unfortunately, no. An image in the correct size is an image. An image in the wrong size is a mess. This can go wrong in a number of ways.
Incorrectly Sized Photos Gone Wrong
For instance, images that are too large for their container must be shrunk down by the system to which they’re uploaded, whether we’re talking about Etsy, Amazon, or Facebook. To a certain extent, these systems do a good job addressing file size issues, reducing them, and helping you crop appropriately.
However, they can only go so far. When an image is just too large (say, 6,000 pixels across for a 1,500-pixel container), the change in size will lead to a serious degradation in resolution. Often, as the software tries to keep the image while massively reducing pixels, the picture loses definition and becomes super blurry.
The opposite problem can also occur: sometimes an image is too small for its container. For example, you might need to fill a 2,000-pixel container, but your image is only 800 pixels wide. When that happens, the image gets stretched too large. The system is forced to work only with the graphic information it has, so instead of making a bigger picture at equal resolution, it blows it up and fills in the missing pixels with the same colors as those around it.
This leads to a chunky effect that fools no one – and customers hate it. When they see pixelated product photos, they’ll almost certainly leave in search of better photography.
Most organizations these days take enough product photography that such dramatically out-of-proportion photos are relatively rare. However, even slight mismatches between the required size or dimensions of the image and the actual image can pose issues.
Benefits of Correct Sizing
That’s where image resizing comes in. Changing the size of a picture to suit its exact purpose can help address the above issues, leading to images that are:
- Always sharp and defined at any size, neither pixelated or blurry
- The right dimensions for the container, so there’s no loss of important details at the margins
- Compressed enough to send quickly over the web, but not so small that they lose their resolution
- Ideal for website performance, leading to quicker load time and clearer resolution
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
This in turn enhances the user experience, makes people want to hang around and scroll through your photos longer, and increases conversions.
Given such benefits, it’s no wonder image resizing becomes such a good idea. But how exactly do you do it? Let’s take a look now.
What Is Image Resizing?
So what exactly does it mean to resize an image? This depends, first and foremost, on what kind of image it is.
Image Types
Vector images are easy to resize. These are created in a graphic design program (think Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, or Procreate) and include only strokes and lines created in the program using a series of connected points, known as vectors. These are geometrically based and can be increased endlessly without loss of resolution, provided the graphic design file doesn’t include any photos.
Photographs, on the other hand, are considered raster objects. That means instead of points they’re based on pixels, which are little squares of color. When you zoom out on a high-resolution image, there are so many pixels per inch that your eye can’t determine the individual squares. But when you zoom in, they appear, making the image “pixelated.”
The trouble with image resizing, therefore, arises with raster images. These cannot be scaled up without eventually pixelating, and they can’t be scaled down without an eventual critical loss of resolution. You need better approaches to image resizing if you want the photos to look good afterward.
Types of Image Resizing
There are three basic ways you can adjust a photo – or a graphic that has already been exported and has to be resized outside its program of creation. These include:
- Scaling down: Making an image smaller is the easiest way to change the size of an image. When you use a photo editing program to do this, the program will scale down the image in such a way that all the main elements are preserved, leading to a crisp image even at, say, a third the size. It’s important to do this in a photo editor before uploading it to an ecommerce or social media platform, where it won’t receive such nice treatment.
- Upsizing: Inflating an image can easily lead to pixelation if you don’t use the right software. That’s why you need a media editor that can upsize a photo correctly, identifying the main shapes and colors, then rebuilding the image at a larger size with the same refined resolution as the smaller one. This is beyond the purview of many image editors and requires AI-based abilities.
- Cropping: This is technically a way to resize an image, since you’re removing part of it. Once you finish cropping, you can either leave it, or scale it up or down.
Now that we’ve discussed why it matters that your images are the correct size, and taken a brief look at how to do so, let us return to the main point of this article: website and social media performance.
How to Resize an Image Online
We know how important it is to be able to make your content go further. There are endless social media channels and platforms to post and sell your content on. So, we created our own Image Resizer tool to help you optimize and improve the performance of your content.
Easily Resize & Crop Your Images with our Image Resizer Tool
Image Resizing and Performance Improvement
Now that you have access to our Image Resizer, let’s talk about why it’s important to optimize your images for website and social media performance.
Website Performance
Large images can slow down website performance and lead to reduced conversions on an ecommerce site. According to a roundup of research, “Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%” and “Mobify found that each 100ms improvement in their homepage's load time resulted in a 1.11% increase in conversion.”
Moreover, adds the above source, “47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.” And according to Essential, “A reported 40% of users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.”
As such, you must make sure every image on your site – from ecommerce photos to hero images – is as large as it needs to be, and no larger.
So what if it’s not your website? Sadly, the wrong image sizes will still get in your way. Take Amazon photos, which are supposed to be at least 1,000 pixels tall or wide and are better off being at least 1,600.
When you upload photos that are only 600 pixels across, pixelation is the inevitable result. 6,000 pixels across? Blurriness will be your fate.
Social Media Performance
The same is true for social media. A photo that’s too small or large for the platform will render weirdly both in the post and on the feed, while a correctly sized one will be sharp at every level: the individual post, on the feed, on desktop, and on mobile.
Again, it might be tempting to dismiss social media as merely an add-on to your marketing regimen, a “nice to have” visual element. But that’s far from true, given the major role social plays in consumer purchasing decisions today.
Social media is at a minimum the beginning of the funnel, so the beauty of your images will tell people a lot about your business. If they don’t like what they see, it will have real repercussions in the form of fewer likes, follows, saves, and shares. It gets worse, though: social media is now a funnel unto itself.
“Nearly half (47%) of US consumers have made a purchase through social media, while 6 in 10 (58%) are interested in doing so,” reports Mintel. “Another 39% of US consumers have made a purchase through social media and would do so again.” That is to say, the vast majority of those who have used social to shop are eager to continue doing so.
As you can see, there’s a lot on the line. Which means knowing the ins and outs of image resizing is critical for your business.
What’s in a Size? Correct Specs for Every Channel
Researching and determining the right sizes for every channel would take you weeks. We know, because we did exactly that, and it took us forever … but we’re pleased to be able to offer the results of our efforts here, for free.
Below, you’ll find in-depth image size and dimension guidelines for the biggest ecommerce and social media platforms. Each guide includes various sizing requirements for ads, different types of posts, and more. Make sure to bookmark them for future use!
Once you have the correct image resizing guidelines at your disposal, you’re most of the way there. But there are still other ways to optimize your photos to ensure the best performance of your website, ecommerce shops, and social media channels.
How to Optimize Photos Visually
Beyond image resizing, there are a number of ways to optimize your photos that will increase the efficacy of your online footprint. Here are a few of our favorite tips:
- Build a shot list: A scattered approach to product photography is understandable, with how much you have on your plate. However, the internet and its denizens won’t forgive you for disorganized or low-quality content. That’s why it’s so important to build a shot list and know exactly what you want to shoot, in what environment, and for what purpose. Whether you take the photos yourself or hire someone to do it, you’ll know exactly what you need, in what sizes, which will increase your online performance significantly.
- Get rid of shadows: Sometimes shadows are desirable, but only if you intend for them to be there. Otherwise, they can be distracting or make your photography look unprofessional at any size, so it’s important to know how to get rid of them.
- Use the right backgrounds: Finding and using the correct backgrounds for product photography is admittedly difficult. Should you use bokeh? Blurry greenery? A lovely marble countertop? A plain-colored background? A computer-generated one? Black and white? Text? Optimizing your images requires choosing the correct background to highlight whatever is in the foreground, from a model to a wine bottle to a bouquet. If you’re not sure how to pair one with the other, it might be time for expert help.
- Finetune color: Color is everything, and your colors must pass two tests. First, they must be true to the product. When customers get items that look vastly different than they did online, they’re irritated. Two, they must mesh well with your brand overall, which makes choosing the right background even more important.
Again, a professional can help with this – and image resizing in general – if you need. Now let’s turn our attention to other ways in which you can optimize an image for the best web and social media performance.
Other Considerations for Image Optimization
Whether you’re uploading a photo or graphic to Shopify, Instagram, your website, or anywhere else, it’s important to run through a checklist before you call an image good. That way, instead of giving it the subjective thumbs-up, you can take a more objective approach that is likely to perform better online.
To create a ready-to-go image, make sure you:
- Choose the right file type: The main image types are JPEG, GIF, and PNG. While JPEGs compress well, they degrade with many re-saves over time, whereas GIFs and PNGs do not. However, PNGs support better color than GIFs, so are often the preferred ecommerce file type.
- Create nice thumbnails: Again, image resizing is critical here. You can’t simply load in the same images as you do for the product listing; you have to create images expressly for this purpose if you want them to render well.
- Name files with keywords: This is better for SEO and makes it easy to find in your own system.
- Rethink unnecessary images: Where they’re not needed, leave images off your website. No matter how pretty, they slow down your load time.
- Test images: When you put up an image, check it out on multiple devices. See if it’s grainy, blurry, pixelated, washed out, or otherwise underperforming.
Of course, there are any number of ways to improve an image’s performance online beyond image resizing, and you could spend the rest of your life tweaking product photography. To save you the time, effort, and energy it takes to make sure your images perform well wherever you sell and post, we created Listing Insights– the first visual optimization tool to measure the performance of your creative!
You can receive instant insights via the “soona score,” which takes into account platform guidelines and industry best practices. All you have to do is:
- Connect your Amazon storefront with soona’s Listing Insights dashboard.
- Watch our AI tool instantly analyze and measure your creative.
- Unlock targeted creative recommendations to improve your product listings performance.
When you’ve received your creative insights & optimized your product listing images, it’s time to store it in a safe place and turn your attention to other activities. But what should that safe place look like?
Keep All Your Images in One Place
Many organizations, when they learn how important image resizing is, make a conscientious effort to transform their process and ensure that future photos and graphics are correctly tailored to the platform and purpose for which they’re meant. This is admirable, but sadly, it’s not enough.
Why? Because without a consistent organizational structure, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of using the wrong images even when you have the right ones on hand. Even in the modern age, many companies rely on messy or outdated file architecture – some photos here, some there; different repositories; photos stored on hard drives rather than in the cloud; no single source of truth.
It can be a real nightmare. And when it means a well-meaning underling accidentally pulls the wrong photo – or the right photo in the wrong size – you can’t really blame them.
What’s the answer? A smart product information management (PIM) system. Also known as a digital asset manager (DAM), PIMs are meant to collate all your imagery and other digital assets in one place, so you always have a go-to place to upload, download, and edit your media.
Plus, you can create intelligent file architectures that put all your assets in one place, sorted by size, using metadata to help pull them up quickly. Even better, you can set a single current asset so no one worries about using the wrong one ever again.
Without a PIM, image resizing is a lot more troublesome. With one, it becomes a simple matter of running routines day after day, streamlining your workflow, and helping your business grow almost effortlessly.
At soona, we’re here to help. Product Catalog is the PIM you’ve been searching for. It’s free for soona users and totally intuitive, allowing you to view all your content in one place and plan much more effectively for your future content needs. We invite you to take a look today!
Everyone loves pulling up a website that renders with a bright green background, purple text in Comic Sans, a dancing waving logo, and a couple of pixelated images that load line by line.
Psych! No one likes that, and it comes down to the basic reason that we prefer well-performing websites and social media posts.
The question becomes, how do you optimize your channels so that the majority of people who stumble across them – or intentionally come to find them – react with approval and pleasure? There are, of course, a million answers to this question (and we sure do like to tackle them here at soona), but at the very top of the list are great images.
Why do images matter so much?
“When deciding whether to make a potential purchase, 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos,” says LinkedIn. They add, “across social channels, photo and imagery posts are the most-used content type to increase audience engagement.”
Not only do your photos bring people in initially, their quality and genuineness have long-term implications for your brand. According to the same LinkedIn source, 22% of returns happen because the product doesn’t look the same in person as it did online.
So let’s get it right … right?
Right. In this article, we will talk about resizing images for websites and social media. We will also cover the requirements for different platforms and other factors to consider for image optimization. Lastly, we will explore methods for managing a large collection of product images.
Benefits of Correct Image Sizing
An image is an image, is it not?
Unfortunately, no. An image in the correct size is an image. An image in the wrong size is a mess. This can go wrong in a number of ways.
Incorrectly Sized Photos Gone Wrong
For instance, images that are too large for their container must be shrunk down by the system to which they’re uploaded, whether we’re talking about Etsy, Amazon, or Facebook. To a certain extent, these systems do a good job addressing file size issues, reducing them, and helping you crop appropriately.
However, they can only go so far. When an image is just too large (say, 6,000 pixels across for a 1,500-pixel container), the change in size will lead to a serious degradation in resolution. Often, as the software tries to keep the image while massively reducing pixels, the picture loses definition and becomes super blurry.
The opposite problem can also occur: sometimes an image is too small for its container. For example, you might need to fill a 2,000-pixel container, but your image is only 800 pixels wide. When that happens, the image gets stretched too large. The system is forced to work only with the graphic information it has, so instead of making a bigger picture at equal resolution, it blows it up and fills in the missing pixels with the same colors as those around it.
This leads to a chunky effect that fools no one – and customers hate it. When they see pixelated product photos, they’ll almost certainly leave in search of better photography.
Most organizations these days take enough product photography that such dramatically out-of-proportion photos are relatively rare. However, even slight mismatches between the required size or dimensions of the image and the actual image can pose issues.
Benefits of Correct Sizing
That’s where image resizing comes in. Changing the size of a picture to suit its exact purpose can help address the above issues, leading to images that are:
- Always sharp and defined at any size, neither pixelated or blurry
- The right dimensions for the container, so there’s no loss of important details at the margins
- Compressed enough to send quickly over the web, but not so small that they lose their resolution
- Ideal for website performance, leading to quicker load time and clearer resolution
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
This in turn enhances the user experience, makes people want to hang around and scroll through your photos longer, and increases conversions.
Given such benefits, it’s no wonder image resizing becomes such a good idea. But how exactly do you do it? Let’s take a look now.
What Is Image Resizing?
So what exactly does it mean to resize an image? This depends, first and foremost, on what kind of image it is.
Image Types
Vector images are easy to resize. These are created in a graphic design program (think Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, or Procreate) and include only strokes and lines created in the program using a series of connected points, known as vectors. These are geometrically based and can be increased endlessly without loss of resolution, provided the graphic design file doesn’t include any photos.
Photographs, on the other hand, are considered raster objects. That means instead of points they’re based on pixels, which are little squares of color. When you zoom out on a high-resolution image, there are so many pixels per inch that your eye can’t determine the individual squares. But when you zoom in, they appear, making the image “pixelated.”
The trouble with image resizing, therefore, arises with raster images. These cannot be scaled up without eventually pixelating, and they can’t be scaled down without an eventual critical loss of resolution. You need better approaches to image resizing if you want the photos to look good afterward.
Types of Image Resizing
There are three basic ways you can adjust a photo – or a graphic that has already been exported and has to be resized outside its program of creation. These include:
- Scaling down: Making an image smaller is the easiest way to change the size of an image. When you use a photo editing program to do this, the program will scale down the image in such a way that all the main elements are preserved, leading to a crisp image even at, say, a third the size. It’s important to do this in a photo editor before uploading it to an ecommerce or social media platform, where it won’t receive such nice treatment.
- Upsizing: Inflating an image can easily lead to pixelation if you don’t use the right software. That’s why you need a media editor that can upsize a photo correctly, identifying the main shapes and colors, then rebuilding the image at a larger size with the same refined resolution as the smaller one. This is beyond the purview of many image editors and requires AI-based abilities.
- Cropping: This is technically a way to resize an image, since you’re removing part of it. Once you finish cropping, you can either leave it, or scale it up or down.
Now that we’ve discussed why it matters that your images are the correct size, and taken a brief look at how to do so, let us return to the main point of this article: website and social media performance.
How to Resize an Image Online
We know how important it is to be able to make your content go further. There are endless social media channels and platforms to post and sell your content on. So, we created our own Image Resizer tool to help you optimize and improve the performance of your content.
Easily Resize & Crop Your Images with our Image Resizer Tool
Image Resizing and Performance Improvement
Now that you have access to our Image Resizer, let’s talk about why it’s important to optimize your images for website and social media performance.
Website Performance
Large images can slow down website performance and lead to reduced conversions on an ecommerce site. According to a roundup of research, “Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%” and “Mobify found that each 100ms improvement in their homepage's load time resulted in a 1.11% increase in conversion.”
Moreover, adds the above source, “47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.” And according to Essential, “A reported 40% of users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.”
As such, you must make sure every image on your site – from ecommerce photos to hero images – is as large as it needs to be, and no larger.
So what if it’s not your website? Sadly, the wrong image sizes will still get in your way. Take Amazon photos, which are supposed to be at least 1,000 pixels tall or wide and are better off being at least 1,600.
When you upload photos that are only 600 pixels across, pixelation is the inevitable result. 6,000 pixels across? Blurriness will be your fate.
Social Media Performance
The same is true for social media. A photo that’s too small or large for the platform will render weirdly both in the post and on the feed, while a correctly sized one will be sharp at every level: the individual post, on the feed, on desktop, and on mobile.
Again, it might be tempting to dismiss social media as merely an add-on to your marketing regimen, a “nice to have” visual element. But that’s far from true, given the major role social plays in consumer purchasing decisions today.
Social media is at a minimum the beginning of the funnel, so the beauty of your images will tell people a lot about your business. If they don’t like what they see, it will have real repercussions in the form of fewer likes, follows, saves, and shares. It gets worse, though: social media is now a funnel unto itself.
“Nearly half (47%) of US consumers have made a purchase through social media, while 6 in 10 (58%) are interested in doing so,” reports Mintel. “Another 39% of US consumers have made a purchase through social media and would do so again.” That is to say, the vast majority of those who have used social to shop are eager to continue doing so.
As you can see, there’s a lot on the line. Which means knowing the ins and outs of image resizing is critical for your business.
What’s in a Size? Correct Specs for Every Channel
Researching and determining the right sizes for every channel would take you weeks. We know, because we did exactly that, and it took us forever … but we’re pleased to be able to offer the results of our efforts here, for free.
Below, you’ll find in-depth image size and dimension guidelines for the biggest ecommerce and social media platforms. Each guide includes various sizing requirements for ads, different types of posts, and more. Make sure to bookmark them for future use!
Once you have the correct image resizing guidelines at your disposal, you’re most of the way there. But there are still other ways to optimize your photos to ensure the best performance of your website, ecommerce shops, and social media channels.
How to Optimize Photos Visually
Beyond image resizing, there are a number of ways to optimize your photos that will increase the efficacy of your online footprint. Here are a few of our favorite tips:
- Build a shot list: A scattered approach to product photography is understandable, with how much you have on your plate. However, the internet and its denizens won’t forgive you for disorganized or low-quality content. That’s why it’s so important to build a shot list and know exactly what you want to shoot, in what environment, and for what purpose. Whether you take the photos yourself or hire someone to do it, you’ll know exactly what you need, in what sizes, which will increase your online performance significantly.
- Get rid of shadows: Sometimes shadows are desirable, but only if you intend for them to be there. Otherwise, they can be distracting or make your photography look unprofessional at any size, so it’s important to know how to get rid of them.
- Use the right backgrounds: Finding and using the correct backgrounds for product photography is admittedly difficult. Should you use bokeh? Blurry greenery? A lovely marble countertop? A plain-colored background? A computer-generated one? Black and white? Text? Optimizing your images requires choosing the correct background to highlight whatever is in the foreground, from a model to a wine bottle to a bouquet. If you’re not sure how to pair one with the other, it might be time for expert help.
- Finetune color: Color is everything, and your colors must pass two tests. First, they must be true to the product. When customers get items that look vastly different than they did online, they’re irritated. Two, they must mesh well with your brand overall, which makes choosing the right background even more important.
Again, a professional can help with this – and image resizing in general – if you need. Now let’s turn our attention to other ways in which you can optimize an image for the best web and social media performance.
Other Considerations for Image Optimization
Whether you’re uploading a photo or graphic to Shopify, Instagram, your website, or anywhere else, it’s important to run through a checklist before you call an image good. That way, instead of giving it the subjective thumbs-up, you can take a more objective approach that is likely to perform better online.
To create a ready-to-go image, make sure you:
- Choose the right file type: The main image types are JPEG, GIF, and PNG. While JPEGs compress well, they degrade with many re-saves over time, whereas GIFs and PNGs do not. However, PNGs support better color than GIFs, so are often the preferred ecommerce file type.
- Create nice thumbnails: Again, image resizing is critical here. You can’t simply load in the same images as you do for the product listing; you have to create images expressly for this purpose if you want them to render well.
- Name files with keywords: This is better for SEO and makes it easy to find in your own system.
- Rethink unnecessary images: Where they’re not needed, leave images off your website. No matter how pretty, they slow down your load time.
- Test images: When you put up an image, check it out on multiple devices. See if it’s grainy, blurry, pixelated, washed out, or otherwise underperforming.
Of course, there are any number of ways to improve an image’s performance online beyond image resizing, and you could spend the rest of your life tweaking product photography. To save you the time, effort, and energy it takes to make sure your images perform well wherever you sell and post, we created Listing Insights– the first visual optimization tool to measure the performance of your creative!
You can receive instant insights via the “soona score,” which takes into account platform guidelines and industry best practices. All you have to do is:
- Connect your Amazon storefront with soona’s Listing Insights dashboard.
- Watch our AI tool instantly analyze and measure your creative.
- Unlock targeted creative recommendations to improve your product listings performance.
When you’ve received your creative insights & optimized your product listing images, it’s time to store it in a safe place and turn your attention to other activities. But what should that safe place look like?
Keep All Your Images in One Place
Many organizations, when they learn how important image resizing is, make a conscientious effort to transform their process and ensure that future photos and graphics are correctly tailored to the platform and purpose for which they’re meant. This is admirable, but sadly, it’s not enough.
Why? Because without a consistent organizational structure, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of using the wrong images even when you have the right ones on hand. Even in the modern age, many companies rely on messy or outdated file architecture – some photos here, some there; different repositories; photos stored on hard drives rather than in the cloud; no single source of truth.
It can be a real nightmare. And when it means a well-meaning underling accidentally pulls the wrong photo – or the right photo in the wrong size – you can’t really blame them.
What’s the answer? A smart product information management (PIM) system. Also known as a digital asset manager (DAM), PIMs are meant to collate all your imagery and other digital assets in one place, so you always have a go-to place to upload, download, and edit your media.
Plus, you can create intelligent file architectures that put all your assets in one place, sorted by size, using metadata to help pull them up quickly. Even better, you can set a single current asset so no one worries about using the wrong one ever again.
Without a PIM, image resizing is a lot more troublesome. With one, it becomes a simple matter of running routines day after day, streamlining your workflow, and helping your business grow almost effortlessly.
At soona, we’re here to help. Product Catalog is the PIM you’ve been searching for. It’s free for soona users and totally intuitive, allowing you to view all your content in one place and plan much more effectively for your future content needs. We invite you to take a look today!
